Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Chestertown, MD, August 31, 2005 — Washington College's Sophie Kerr Committee presents "'Blameth Nat Me if that Ye Chese Amys': Deliberation and Prudent (or Imprudent) Choice in The Canterbury Tales," a lecture by Professor Robert Hanning, Columbia University, Monday, September 19, at 4:30 p.m. in the Rose O'Neill Literary House. The event is free, and the public is invited to attend.

A member of the Columbia faculty since 1963 and Professor of English since 1971, Hanning has focused his research on Old and Middle English literature, Chaucer, Medieval Romance, Boccacio, Castiglione and Ariosto. He is the author of The Vision of History in Early Britain (1966) and The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance (1977), as well as the co-translator, with Joan Ferrante, of The Lais of Marie de France (1978). Although a lifelong New Yorker, Hanning has taught as a visiting professor at Yale, Princeton, Johns Hopkins and NYU, and has served as Director of the Bread Loaf program at Lincoln College in Oxford.

The lecture is sponsored by the Sophie Kerr Committee, which works to carry on the legacy of the late Sophie Kerr, a writer from Denton, Md., whose generosity has done so much to enrich Washington College's literary culture. When she died in 1965, Kerr left the bulk of her estate to the College, specifying that one half of the income from her bequest be awarded every year to the senior showing the most "ability and promise for future fulfillment in the field of literary endeavor" and the other half be used to bring visiting writers to campus, to fund scholarships and to help defray the costs of student publications.